Obama rode to our nomination on his pledge to get us out of Iraq as soon as possible. His health care plan is interesting. Prudence has dictated silence on fiscal rescue matters, although he has advocated a large bottom-up stimulus package (Hey, I could USE $7,000!). There's a lot to talk about here -- jobs, education, conservation, energy, industry, trade, etc., etc., etc.

California's new proposal to legalize pot makes tremendous sense. Pot is only illegal because 70 years ago some moralists thought that pot fostered integration. That's it. No known fatalities due to overdose or people excited to violence, yet it is illegal.

Why now? Everything is coming to a head: the cost of jailing nonviolent pot sellers and smokers is now becoming a real burden when law enforcement budgets are being slashed. Several states now must choose who they want to arrest and jail, and jailed pot smokers is lowhanging fruit to release.http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/03/03/legalize_marijuana/index.html. It's been 40 years, and the original pot smokers are now approaching senior citizen status, and it's clear that there are no long-term risks to smoking marijuana. Mexico is going through a massive crime wave where legalization would cut off the narcotrafficers source of income because pot could be grown locally. California pot would immediately replace blood-soaked Mexican weed that people could grow and use without guilt.

Legalizing and taxing pot will bring in new revenue, and no longer prosecuting the war on drugs will save it as well. It's a win-win for everybody: users, law enforcement, taxpayers.

While California wants to do it, to really make it safe we need to end the Federal Prohibition laws. Last year Barney Frank Introduced his bill to make small amounts of marijuana legal. It's time to put some juice behind Barney's efforts and get him to reintroduce.

Interesting points about the Drug-Free Coalition. Alcohol and Cigarettes kill far more people than even heroin. But the war on pot has more, and apparently always has had more to do with demonizing minorities and enforcing religious statues than addiction concerns. In addition, I have yet to see any concern from people like this about the paramilitary tactics of the War on Drugs with its surveillance, long sentences given to the non violent user, or the discrimation against former users (no federal financial aid or housing after conviction, job discrimination). And how much support is there for national health care that could finance rehabilitation for abusers so that sobriety doesn't cost them their health coverage?

If there was honesty, the coalitions would refuse funding from the alcohol and tobacco lobby and self-fund, like AA.

Whatever you think about Alcoholics Anonymous, they are not prohibitionist. Their concern is those who are having problems with sobriety. Even the Big Book talks about people who drink heavily but are still functional. And cigarettes are tolerated in AA. The Twelve traditions with their emphasis on humility and anonymity prevent such crusades against those who are not willing or interested in change.

The War on Drugs costs us so very much money, and costs us our liberties, which are more important than money. But it is just nonsense to have these laws against some drugs (most notably marijuana) that could have the bejeebers taxed out of them and still cost less than they do to end users on the black market. That's a mountain of cash that we're forfeiting just because some people don't want others to have any fun.

I agree, Ferg. Today I watched a segment where stimulus money was needed to hire already trained cops. If we repealed the war on pot, those cops could be more economically used to go after robbers and violent criminals, and the needed extra cells go to violent criminals.

I believe Obama secretly wants to end this war and focus on prevention and perhaps go after harder drugs like cocaine and meth. But he cannot do this in his first term without stirring up the hypermoralists.

A Drug War Stat: <a href="http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/53">872,720</a> That's the number of marijuana arrestsin 2007. Letting these people out or off the hook and out of the judicial system, and no longer arresting others, would take a huge strain off of the now severely understaffed judicial system.

I posted this on Daily Kos:Then people would have to just decide on their own what to do about pot. Unfortunately it's also a legal problem that leads to a job and career and everything else problem.

I don't think it's DuPont or the cigarette and alcohol lobbies keeping pot illegal now. Artificial fibers are now firmly established. Given diminished returns on tobacco, I bet the tobacco industry would love to just jettison 90% of the market and substitute pot for it. Pot doesn't have the medical consequences of use that tobacco does, meaning that there would be little pressure to push for settlements by the states. The alcohol people would just make Seagrams flavored pot brownies or see it as an extra product to sell.

The real reasons I believe are the same moralists who have tried for years to make other things they disapprove of illegal because they think they are immoral. They are the ones that keep coming up with reasons to ban use by adults for the sake of the "children"-the children of the middle class. Poor children who get in the crossfire of warring drug gangs or whose parents must deal to keep a roof over their heads are not their concern at all. Not to mention the children of low-level users who then become the wards of the system and get bounced from home to home. These moralists consider their suffering a lesson-a lesson that only teaches the suffering that morality is another control mechanism that puts down the poor.

Another group I think happens to be the "recovery industry". I'm not against recovery, but some people have a blind spot here. Some come from homes and families and situations where out of control use and abuse have made their lives miserable, and think that making/keeping things illegal would prevent more misery. Such experiences color their lives greatly to the point where they simply cannot acknowledge that there are people who use pot without becoming idiots and abusive. They simply cannot "see" a lifestyle of moderate use at all-of people who go home and do just a little of something, who try something once and the forget about it. They think that by keeping things illegal, there would be less substance for people to abuse and less abusers. These people are the ones who insist that legalization will make more users and that society will collapse under its weight. History does not bear this out. Prohibition of alcohol ended, and alcohol use found its own level.

Law enforcement may have some moralizers. Some may like the extra money that comes in from locking up dopers. But others like LEAP-Law Enforcement Against Prohibition-would rather leave the futile drug war behind. Locking up otherwise peaceful citizens brings has to make law enforcement cynical about the process. It creates a climate of suspicion that makes it difficult to solve other crimes, enables the corrupt who take bribes or favors from those who they are supposed to be policing.